Home Planet: Rumors are poison not worth ingesting

A rumor, even a luscious, seven-layer-cake of a rumor, isn’t a difficult thing to prepare. Anyone can do it. You need only three ingredients: Someone to talk to, someone to talk about and someone to pass it along.

That’s all it takes to whip up a batch of poison.

I was offered a little slice of a rumor the other day. It was clever and skillfully done.

“So-and-so,” the gossipy little e-mail went, forwarded to me by a concerned friend, “is saying…” and a nasty little bombshell was dropped.

Since “so-and-so” is also a friend I was surprised, and since the juicy little tidbit included both our names, I picked up the phone and called her.

Funny, like me, it was the first she’d heard of the whole matter.

The rumor fell as flat as a soufflé. And it fell right back into the lap of the person who had started it. Right back into the cook’s kitchen.

Gossip is more than the game we played as children when we passed a whispered sentence from one to another and then laughed at the garbled message repeated by the last one in the circle.

We don’t particularly mind gossip when it’s not about us. And, we don’t mind being the conduit as long as we’re not caught. But when we’re the victim, well, that’s quite another thing.

Gossip is what makes high school a miserable place to be. It’s what kills time – and energy – around the table in the cafeteria at work. Gossip is a way to hide and throw stones, to take a shot at someone from under cover. It’s mean and mean-spirited.

Rumors are nasty. They can damage and disrupt lives. They can have serious consequences. And yet, even as adults, there are those who spend time and energy concocting them and serving them up to anyone who will listen. They whisper. They hit the send button. They stir it all up and keep the burner warm.

So-and-so, the person given credit for starting the rumor that had been passed along to me, was understandably angry about being used to deflect attention away from the one who’d actually done the dirty work. And, I was left with a bad taste about it all, myself.

So often, the secret element, the prime component of any grudge or rumor or bit of dishy gossip, is a bunch of sour grapes. And the best thing to do with the bad – sour fruit, sour milk or a sour disposition – is to toss it out. But the incident gave me something to think about.

In this case, there are three of us, at least, who know the truth. And that ought to take care of that. The little rumor forwarded to me was petty and spiteful. And it didn’t hold up under scrutiny. But every day people are ambushed by people who know exactly what they’re doing. People who start the whisper and pass it along and then pull out of the circle.

They’re not playing a game. They know exactly what they’re cooking up. It’s poison. And they’ll feed it to you with a smile.